It’s becoming increasingly clear to me from the conversations I’m having with talent acquisition professionals worldwide that what happens in the coming months will set a course for a wholesale transformation of our industry. Talent markets are changing, technology is changing, employers are changing, and the very nature of work itself is changing.
So how do we navigate these disruptive times? My guest this week is Joe Mullings, Chairman and CEO of the Mullings Groups of Companies. Joe has some very strong and very well informed opinions on what the future looks like for talent acquisition. Take a listen to our conversation, and I would love to know whether you agree or disagree with him.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ What happens next?
▪ The challenges of the hybrid workforce
▪ Disruptive forces in the talent market
▪ Building a hiring brand
▪ The golden age of recruiting
▪ The difference between HR and Talent Acquisition
▪ Who has the leverage?
▪ Talent Acquisition versus Talent Access
▪ Advice for Talent Acquisition and HR professionals
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes From Avature, the AI powered total talent platform trusted by 110 of the Fortune 500 from initial candidate engagement. Through onboarding, talent mobility and performance management, Avature enables organizations to meet their unique needs while delighting and engaging all stakeholders. Just listen to what Nilesh Boote, Director of recruitment at L’Oreal, has to say. The solutions that we have created are.
Joe Mullings [00:00:29]:
So specific to L’Oreal that it just.
Joe Mullings [00:00:31]:
Feels like a team sitting outside of.
Joe Mullings [00:00:33]:
L’Oreal and working for us.
Matt Alder [00:00:34]:
If you sign up with Avature, it’s for sure signing up with a company with whom you will be really able to design solutions the way you want and also embark on a journey where innovation is at the core. Visit avature.net and discover why global leaders like L’Oreal join use Avature to power their recruiting and talent management strategies.
Matt Alder [00:01:17]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 350 of the Recruiting Future podcast. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me from the conversations I’m having with talent acquisition professionals worldwide that what happens in the coming months will set a course for a wholesale transformation of our industry. Talent markets are changing, technology is changing, employers are changing, and the very nature of work itself is changing. So how do we navigate these disruptive times? My guest this week is Joe Mullings, Chairman and CEO of the Mullings Group of Companies. Joe has some very strong and very well informed opinions on what the future looks like for talent acquisition. Take a listen to our conversation and I would love to know whether you agree or disagree with him.
Matt Alder [00:02:14]:
Hi Joe and welcome to the podcast.
Joe Mullings [00:02:17]:
Good to be here, Matt. Thank you so much for having me on as a guest.
Matt Alder [00:02:20]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Joe Mullings [00:02:26]:
Sure. Joe Mullings I am President and CEO of the Mullings Group. We are a search firm in the medical device industry. Over the last 30 years, we’ve had more than 7,000 successful placements in the medtech industry around the world and I’m also the Chief Vision Officer for Management Recruiters International, which is one of the top search services fir in the world and we’ve got 320 plus offices scattered around the globe.
Matt Alder [00:02:53]:
We’ve had an exceptionally disruptive last 12 months when it comes to everything, but obviously in the context of what we’re talking about, where it comes to talent acquisition and employment and recruiting. Now we seem to be reaching this sort of inflection point around what’s going to happen next. And one of the big debates is are we seeing companies returning to their office or are we seeing the death of the office? Now, as someone who’s constantly looking at this space, what are you seeing? What are you hearing? What do you think is going to happen next?
Joe Mullings [00:03:26]:
Well, gosh, I wish I could forecast that. So I think you’ve got to look at it in a few different phases. The current phase will index over index towards a work from home environment because we still are in a pre pandemic mindset. Actually middle of a pandemic mindset versus a pre pandemic mindset. And we’re just now emerging out, we hope, at least from the US perspective. Oh, US is a little different. But let me comment on the US perspective. So we’ve got, I would say probably still 90% of the population working from home. And how that declares itself over the next six to 12 months will be an indication of what that ramps up to be on the world of work moving forward. I do believe we will have probably anywhere from 20 to 30% of our workforce remote or working from home. And I do differentiate those because I think there’s going to, there’s going to be a very challenging time ahead, especially for our HR professionals and executives in corporations large and small. So right now people have come accustomed to working from home. I do know that that is going to end up being a driver as people consider whether or not they’re going to take a new role or not as the marketplace opens up and the policies and procedures of a mixed workplace for the HR professionals and the executives running those organizations may be one of the biggest challenges that we will be facing in our return in a post pandemic environment. Everything from pay plans. If I’m the same person working from Des Moines, Iowa as I am working from the Bay Area, how do you ask for time off? If you’ve got an individual who is working from home who can slip in and out of taking the kids to the bus stop or running out to CVS for a prescription versus somebody who’s in the office all the time, or even the individual who’s working from home with a relative newborn sitting in the middle of a corporate meeting with the baby on their lap and then meanwhile there’s another mom sitting in the conference room, a recent mom who’s chosen to go back to work or demanded back to work. And how to manage those dynamics that is going to be a very interesting, what’s called HR Cuisinart moving forward over the next two or three years.
Matt Alder [00:05:59]:
Yeah, I think it’s going to be a fascinating and very challenging time talking, sort of moving on to talk about the talent market at the moment. So going back a few months there was a big focus on what people are calling the sort of the great rehiring. And clearly we’re seeing more roles and more vacancies available in the, in the market and you know, unemployment in many countries in the world still much higher than it was a year ago. But there’s, there seems to be real challenges with organizations recruiting the talent that they need. What are you seeing in the, in the markets that you work in?
Joe Mullings [00:06:39]:
Well, there was a transition occurring in the marketplace pre pandemic. So let’s look at that exam. It’s worthwhile examining that for a second. The contract interim world was growing at a relatively rapid rate while it was still less than 25% of the full employment picture. The trends of the contract interim world, those contracts or sort of interim roles were now extending out a year to two years. Full time employment, which was the lion’s share of the employment marketplace, was now starting to move down from four years to three years. So you had this sort of rapid growth rate in relation to the current employment workforce on the contract interim side and you had a reduction in both time as well as percentage points of the full time employment pre pandemic. Now, in the pandemic you’ve got some interesting dynamics. The female population took a major hit professionally. There were some. They ended up being the ones who had to or were forced to opting out of the employment marketplace because they were in some cases the caregivers at home. And so therefore they ended up having to leave their job to go to home care care of those elderly who were within their family unit and oftentimes were the lower income out of the two earner household. So you had that dynamic, which is really interesting because that’s a dynamic that is leading health care, that’s the dynamic that’s leading retail, that’s the dynamic that’s in the hospitality business. So there’s an enormous gap occurring right now in those workplaces and there’s not a clear timeline on when those individuals can come back online and require those people to work, usually in person, person to person. And it’s still not been deemed as a safe environment to come back to. So that’s going to be a challenge in itself. So that’s one category that is worth Examining. The other category that’s worth examining is businesses now are realizing, just as my business had, is you can work with a remote workforce. It might not be ideal, but it’s manageable. And then second, hiring on demand, being able to flex up and down in order to accommodate your business, is definitely been inserted into the gamebook across all, all categories of business, whether it’s construction, health care, entertainment, accounting, software. They now realize you are not tied geographically to your workforce as much as we thought before March of 2020.
Matt Alder [00:09:41]:
The other big trend that we’ve seen over the last few years, but again, it seems to have really amped up in the last 12 months, has been the adoption and the sophistication of technology that’s used in recruiting and talent acquisition. Do you think that technology plays a part in solving these problems, in helping companies embrace these, these different ways of hiring or different ways of thinking about their workforce?
Joe Mullings [00:10:06]:
It’s a fair question, and it’s how you define technology. So technology has been part of the talent access world for the last couple decades. So when I grew up in this business and I started in 1989, we were still mailing in resumes. We don’t, we didn’t even have the fax machine yet. And then the fax machine came, and then email came, and then came Monster, and Then today it’s LinkedIn. If you’re in the US there’s some others abroad, but we’ll just stay on the US Market for now. And so technology certainly has come in and Zoom moved in over the last 12 to 14 months. Just as an example, probably in my 30 years of business, I probably out of the 7,000 placements, less than 100 of those had been hires where the people did not actually meet face to face. And most of those were international assignments where we pulled off everything over the telephone and or at that time on Zoom. This past year, the last 12 months, our firm has made an excess of 320 successful placements. I will let you know, more than 90% of those in the last 12 months, maybe more, had been never meeting the person in person. That happened all over Zoom. So I think that we were realizing that we can pull that off. Now. It’ll be interesting to watch the long tail of that on what retention occurs out of the next. Out of the last 12 to 14 months, what does that connect to over the next three, four years and retention if you lost that face to face? So I think tech certainly has stepped right up in the facilitation. Now let’s move a little earlier in the process. For years now I’ve been hearing about AI is going to dominate the sort of the intelligent side of talent access. And I honestly don’t believe that in the next five years at least. That’s about as far out as I can see for a number of reasons. One is AI in general is too broad of a term, but let’s, let’s appropriately call it narrow AI where you can look at a set of resumes and or LinkedIn profiles. Well, that’ll be really challenging because if you just understand the basics of an algorithm, in order to have a highly precise algorithm you need a very large data set of what great looks like. So right now you can’t get a very large data set on LinkedIn on what great looks like. You also can’t get a large data set on resumes as they’re written on what great looks like. Because the greatest A players have not put their resumes out in the ecosystem. 99% of the time an A player is happy, she’s happily employed solving problems, she’s in the middle of battling what she loves to do. So her resume is not even open to the public, let alone even private domain. So you’re not going to be able to build a data set that’ll inform an algorithm well enough and in order to add substantial value to AI coming in and giving you your preselected slate of candidates. So that’s one area and then you’re still not gonna lose that face to face. There are so many soft issues that occur in the interview process that are still incredibly sort of subjective based upon the different personalities. That technology will help in the facilitation of the process, but it will never drive top of funnel.
Matt Alder [00:13:41]:
That’s interesting because I think one of the things that happens in the industry is people put AI and automation into the same bucket when it comes to recruiting. And what you’re saying there is that the data sets and the level of machine intelligence isn’t there yet.
Joe Mullings [00:13:59]:
Oh, it’s there, but it’s there, but the data sets aren’t there. So the narrow AI is most definitely there in order to potentially load the funnel. But you don’t have the data sets in order to inform the algorithm and so it might as well not be there. So the technology lies there but the proper use of it, as is the case with a lot of HR functions, and we can come into that after this subject, HR is typically the very last well informed and well suited function in any organization to have meaningful tech put into it. In order for it to execute on its initiatives.
Matt Alder [00:14:38]:
I absolutely agree with you there. And I think that, you know, that’s something that we’ve seen, that we’ve seen for decades in all of the kind of the way of the technology revolution. To come back to the point, I completely get what you’re saying about the data there and would completely, completely agree with you. We tend to put AI and automation in the same bucket though. Do you think that much of the recruitment process can be automated? The rest of it, the more mundane stuff, do you see that as something that is going to happen over the next sort of 6 to 12 months?
Joe Mullings [00:15:10]:
Increasingly, I do believe that the process can create. Okay, so that’s a great question. And Matt, let’s examine that from two perspectives. And this is where most HR functions are ill equipped. It doesn’t mean they’re not capable of. But this is where the executive suite disrespects the HR function very clearly. This is where this occurs. So HR was put into this bucket about 70 years ago. 60, 70 years ago, where HR at that point from a talent access perspective, was tied to print ads and a geography. And so you had a want ad. I’m old enough, I’m 59 to remember really what those were. I went to the back of the news day when I wanted to get my job at 14 years old and went through the want ads. And so all HR did at that point in time was basically put an ad out and then had demand generation, meaning somebody applied for it, it went into at that point, you know, a folder. And then we went through that and then we said, good, good, good, not so good. Great. Bring these in an interview. That has not changed much. We have become fancy with making that digital in nature now, but we really haven’t examined the borderless world that we live in and the different modalities of employment. And HR basically has had all that stuff stuffed on it by the executive leadership. Executive leadership still doesn’t understand that talent access and human resources are two entirely different behaviors. Talent access is an invasive, aggressive jump out in the market and build a message, a hiring brand, a hiring narrative and explain to people why they should follow my company’s hiring brand and, and explain to me who I might become once I lean in and potentially want to work at your organization. HR is responsible. What happens once you are in the organization, who takes care of the family? And for some reason they think executive leadership thinks that those two behaviors can cohabitate underneath the same leadership. And they’re dead wrong. And it’s going to become very, very clear and apparent and it is going to be the golden age of recruiting coming upon us. It’s going to become very apparent now when HR is going to be buried with environmental, health and safety issues. Coming on board with our new, with our teams coming back in managing processes and sops of a work from remote workforce. The entire OSHA onlineing organization of safety and health administration. You’re going to have entire restructuring of the workplace from these shared everybody, 14 people sitting at a 8 by 12 desk. All of this is going to change. And if you think that hr, who is going to be responsible for that is also now going to be able to responsible for this hyper growth environment where candidates hit the market and they’re gone in 12 hours, the good ones. And if you miss out on that now, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re sort of the brains and the brawn and the intellect that lead an organization. You’re going to start to have a deficit in that because the organizations that clearly see the difference between those two functions and respect it and hire for talent and hire for taking care of our family are too different. That is what’s going to change. That’s going to be a massive implosion of certain organizations and it’s going to, it’s going to change the riches of certain industries over the next few years.
Matt Alder [00:19:01]:
And do you think that we’re at that point where those things are genuinely going to change now? Because I say that because sort of looking back over the last 20 years or so there’s been a few points where we’ve thought that this kind of change is coming. That companies are going to really understand what they need to do to get the right talent into their business. Do you think that we really are at that point now?
Joe Mullings [00:19:24]:
I do. I think there’s been a couple inflection points over the last sort of 20 years we can point to now. I believe we start to harden a target once it’s been attacked as is the case with 911 here in the United States. You could have carried shotguns and knives and all kinds of weapons through security. And we saw in a moment in time where we compromised, we no longer would compromise. And you know, whether or not you believe TSA is an effective shield around that certainly stats would support supported is because we haven’t had another situation like that. But I don’t know it’s because of TSA or TSA is the symbol of that. So that’s one, two is we were willing to Give up certain sort of privacy rights or privacy rights we thought we had. What we’re also seeing now is we have now become accustomed to working from a distance, working from home, working from remote, and we’re going to demand it. And so organizations, this is where, and I’ve been talking about this for two years now, I believe that finally, that the employee has the leverage. And until now, the employer thought they had the leverage. Until now, the employee bestowed the leverage on the corporation. And the corporation never really had the leverage. But we were brainwashed. And because our parents taught us at the kitchen table, which is where most good and bad habits are born, that the system decided what we do. And now that the employee is going to realize, and they better not trade it away. If you trade it away, shame on you. If you trade away the leverage that you have right now, you are going to fall back into a less desirable scenario. So having said that, that the employee or the future employee now has the leverage, corporations are going to have to change. And the smart corporations are going to realize that, look, the taxicab had the leverage. They made you wait on that corner until I drove by and I put up my hand in New York City 10 times. But you know what? When you introduce something like Uber, I had the leverage in Airbnb, Marriott, Holiday Inn had the leverage for the guest. Airbnb came along. Now the individual had the leverage. They drove it. I believe it’s going to happen in employment and I don’t think it’s going to be LinkedIn. LinkedIn is not set up for that. But I do believe that you’re going to have a brand new market emerging where it’s going to cater to the individual and then the individual will drive their demands and then there will be an organization that will then become the agent of the individual and market that individual through technology into the workforce. I’m not talking about everybody, but I am talking about the upper echelon, respectfully, of each corporation or each industry, that the individual will now have the leverage as long as they choose not to put it away. And with that, you’re going to have to have a dislocation of paradigm shift of organizations now having to cater to the individual that is here and the early people who embrace that and build their talent access. And notice, I have not used the word acquisition yet because even that word is obscene. Talent acquisition is short for slavery to me. And talent access means I will want access to all of the talent in the marketplace. No corporation owns a person yet they act like they do they treat them like they do. And that’s what the interview process looks like in too many organizations. And I think you’re going to have a major shift right now coming over on that.
Matt Alder [00:23:31]:
That all makes perfect sense, is a complicating factor to that automation. What I mean by that is, you know, for a long time we’ve been talking about aspects of the workforce being, being automated, being replaced by algorithms and robots and things like that. And we’ve, we’ve touched upon that in talent. But there’s lots of data out there that says lots of jobs are going to be automated in the next couple of years, certainly in the next five years. Does that add a complication to all of this? What are you seeing in terms of that broader automation and what do you think might happen?
Joe Mullings [00:24:05]:
So there’s a couple components there and you bring up a good point. When you automate a broken process, it only amplifies the faults in the process. So this whole automation and all of this resume reading and resume intelligence, et cetera, et cetera, that has value. But it’s been put in the wrong hands with the wrong marching orders. So right now HR should not be responsible, nor are they qualified to define what the hiring process, or let’s just call it the process of engagement with the outside marketplace that needs to be architected by a category that does not exist right now in the workplace and because it needs to come from the C suite. And as soon as the C suite realizes that, they’ve got to step back and deconstruct their current hiring process. But even go before that is you should be telling stories at scale about who you will become when you come to work. At our company, we call that hiring brand. We’ve heard it, the reputation, the reach, all of that. So technology up till now has really amplified a broken process. That’s all it’s done. And the good parts of it and the bad parts of it, you now have, let’s just call it rewards, drive, behavior. People are going to determine, leadership’s going to determine that. The only way they’re going to get rewarded with top performers who are the force multipliers are if they change their behaviors on how they engage with them and how they nurture those relationships. Instead of looking for the hire on who’s available over the next 60 days, the progressive organizations are going to keep a four to eight person bench stacked all the time in all their roles in an ongoing nurturing relationship where they’re telling a story, where they’re keeping the employee, the future potential Employee engaged and the future employee is going to have multiple opportunities available for them all the time. All the time. And they are going to be able to negotiate those conversations back and forth, not just with money, but with scale and scope of the responsibility that they want to walk into. So you’re right, tech has been there, but tech is thinking, it’s been in charged, has brainwashed the market that it’s in charged. And when you amplify a broken process, all you get is a broken process that has created all this white noise in the hiring marketplace and has not paid out dividends for most organizations.
Matt Alder [00:26:53]:
What would your advice be to the talent acquisition professionals who are kind of listening right now other than changing what they call themselves?
Joe Mullings [00:27:02]:
Gosh. So for the courageous ones, the first thing I would do is I would tie executive bonuses in part to the hiring brand in the marketplace because that, you know, that’s the only way you’re going to get their attention, the HR professionals, the talent access professionals, because they’re two different things. And it’s at this point in time, classic HR needs to go to leadership and say, listen, not this year, not next year, but in three or four years from now, we’re going to start to feel the consequence of not developing a hiring brand, of not developing an ongoing bench strength to the top 20 percentile of the critical positions in our organization. We’re going to face the consequence of us not bifurcating our HR function and our talent access. And it doesn’t mean your talent access are recruiters. That’s not what it means. Your talent access are the people who are building this hiring brand and explaining to the employees who are going to own the marketplace or the future employees what you will become when you come to work here. That’s going to put a tremendous onus on organizations to rethink how they treat that top of the funnel. So that’s what I would say in hr. If you’re in the last five years of career, write it out. Just write it out. Because the odds of your organization being the one that’s going to change it is remote. However, if you plan on having a career as an executive C suite executive or an HR professional, you want to be less wrong about the future. If you remain on the path you’re on right now, you will be terribly wrong. If you think about what talent access needs to look like, and if you want that, listen, just pay attention to the things we’ve been talking about from our firm for a while. If you want to change talent access, you need to go to leadership and explain. Explain to them the consequences they’re gonna face. And it’s not gonna be the fancy software that people are using right now. It’s going to be building a brand and then building a bench and then building an ongoing nurturing relationship with the top force multipliers in your category around the world. That’s what I would explain for them to do over the next 24 months.
Matt Alder [00:29:21]:
Joe, thank you very much for talking to me.
Joe Mullings [00:29:23]:
I appreciate it. And listen, I appreciate what you do for the industry and share with all the professionals in it. Be well, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:29:31]:
My thanks to Joe. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
